Were the pre-Joe Bengals as bad as most think?

[*Nately120*]

(01-31-2023, 11:52 PM)The American Dream Wrote: Haha thanks Bengalholic did a great job on it.

Mel Brooks is a comedic legend!And John Candy was too of course!

Fun football fact...John Candy was a part-owner of the Toronto Argonauts when they won the Grey Cup in 1991, so his name is forever engraved upon Canadian football history, if nothing else.

(01-31-2023, 11:58 PM)Shake n Blake Wrote: I'll admit that it's a bit of hindsight, but I just look at it as evolving your opinion when presented with new evidence. In 2019, I think most of us probably still believed in Dalton (ok, this one is probably 50/50), Green, Atkins, Dunlap, Burfict, etc.

In truth, most of our talent was closer to the end than most of us realized at the time. I'd like to believe the staff and FO were more aware of this than fans were. We tend to be a sentimental bunch.

Assuming they were aware of this, I'd say they were only kept due to contract guarantees. Besides, new regimes usually tend to = a new core of players, yet we mostly trotted out the same guys, many of which did not seem to fit our new schemes.

Then as contracts allowed us to more reasonably move on from the old core, we started to do so. Gradually reshaping the team entirely.

I get if you or others don't want to believe that's what happened, as we will never know for sure, but when I look at the big picture, that's what I see. Look at how bad Lou's defense was back then vs once the roster was fully turned over. It's a complete 180.

I mean, I think we lucked into Burrow because even teams that are rebuilding have a hard time going 2-14.  As underwhelming as we had been during the tail end of the Marvin era, going 2-14 was unreasonably bad for us.  We needed to match our worst season in history and we managed to do it in a year where the first pick got us Burrow, not Mayfield, or Goff, or Kyler Murray etc.  Getting Chase was another bit of luck given the odds against us being bad enough to get the 4th pick with Burrow under center, but he wasn't under center, so we got it.  I wouldn't call it regular ol' luck since it involved injury, but again...we defied the odds and got a great player for it when the odds were against us having that chance.

But as I said before, when you get lucky you need to make the most of that luck and build upon it and we have, so alls well that ends well and so on.